Hunger
by adaon45
Summary: A missing scene from chapter 4 of OotP.  Attending an Order meeting at Grimmauld Place but, as usual, not staying for dinner, Snape meditates on the connections between food, hunger, and community.


Hunger

_Disclaimer: Mine only to play with, never to own._

They heard the front door open and then close.

"Snape never eats here, " Ron told Harry quietly, "Thank God."

-chapter 4, _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_, U.S. ed.

The door had not finished closing behind him when the house began to disappear. Against the backdrop of a summer night, the normally squat No. 12 Grimmauld Place elongated, squeezed by its neighbors as they pushed towards each other. By the time Nos. 11 and 13 met like long-parted techtonic plates, the last visible sliver of the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix had vanished.

Instead of striding away from meetings as he usually did—without a backward glance—Snape surprised himself both by watching this transformation and feeling a pang of regret when it was over. Was this such a strange reaction, though? He was hungry, and everyone else was staying for dinner in the house he could no longer see. He could imagine the savoury aroma of Molly Weasley's famously excellent cooking, a scent surely more appetizing than what he was actually smelling, the stench of rotting garbage in overflowing bins on the London street.

The thought of the meal from which he was excluded reminded him of the mouth-watering feasts in that Muggle Christmas tale he'd read as a child, the one about the miser visited by ghosts. As Snape recalled, the ghosts showed the old man Christmas dinners which he could not taste himself until he'd become a better person. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, Snape was a reformed man; but whereas Scrooge earned a place at the Cratchits' communal table, Snape remained a bystander at the banquet.

But did he have to? Why could he not stay for dinner just once, he asked himself, before the inevitable, unalterable answers presented themselves. Most obviously he was not sociable by nature, and could not shed his prickly outer self so quickly as Scrooge. But there was a more important reason. To break bread was the ultimate sign of community, and it was his role, even more than his personality, that prevented him from cementing that symbolic bond with others. He might be a member of the Order, but he was also a double agent, and ambiguity was essential to his disguise. If he were to play the part of Death Eater convincingly, there must be no rumors of fraternizing with the Dark Lord's enemies, or indeed of more than minimal contact with the Order from whom he was supposedly stealing secrets.

Snape stopped himself with a snort of disgust. Why in Hades should he be hankering to eat with Order members, anyway? _Do you really fancy sharing a meal with Black? Eager to make small talk with the werewolf? Look forward to passing the dinner rolls to Potter, now that he's joined the merry little crew?_ Yet with more honesty that he usually allowed himself, Snape had to confess that, unappealing as the company might be, a part of him _did _want to stay, to hear the murmur of conversation and laughter, to be included in the circle of lamplight within rather than walking out into the waiting darkness.

But even if he could stay, wouldn't he still be the bystander at the feast?

Given his temperament, it was unlikely he'd be anyone's favorite dinner guest. Worse yet, wouldn't everyone look at him in a way that proved how well he was doing his job, that betrayed their suspicions of his true allegiances? He saw it every time he attended an Order meeting, reflected in the eyes even of decent sorts like Molly and Arthur Weasley who tried to be kind but who nonetheless were obviously uncomfortable around him. Others, especially Black (at whom Snape always glared too), surveyed him with outright abhorrence and distrust.

It was similar to Hogwarts, then, where he was similarly viewed with mingled revulsion and fear. Aside from a Slytherin or two, there were few students who liked the Bat of the Dungeons or his classes. Odd, now that he thought of it in light of his meditations on food, but his role was not unlike that of cooking instructor (not that he would ever publicly admit such a thing). Still, like a master chef he taught his charges how properly to prepare ingredients and then brew, stir, and simmer them. Of course, many of the ingredients used in potion-making were poisons, not substances one would normally eat or find tempting in the first place. How appropriate, he mused bitterly, that this should be the type of cooking he did: even when designed to strengthen or heal, his concoctions appeared disgusting and deadly.

Disgusting and deadly . . . the words reminded him of something he'd heard several times through the Hogwarts grapevine, the long-standing rumor that he was a vampire. A theory, Snape assumed, inspired as much by his thinness and pallor as by his forbidding, black-cloaked persona. He shook his head: if he resembled any supernatural being, it was not a vampire but a ghost. A hungry ghost, craving companionship with the tantalized desperation of spectres longing for the food they could no longer taste. Some spirits, he recalled, even tried to make the strong flavour of rotting food reactivate their taste buds. They never succeeded, but what would happen if they did? Would they think the effort worth it, just to fill their mouths with corruption? Again, he perceived an analogy with himself. Since Lily's death—and his role in bringing it about—he had lived a sort of posthumous existence, unable to take much pleasure in food. More often than not he might as well be swallowing dust and ashes.

Was that what it meant to be a _death eater_? Certainly it was the consequence.

How ironic, too, not to enjoy food at Hogwarts, the magic world's version of Dickensian plentitude. Every meal was a feast, particularly dinner, when course after delectable course materialized on golden plates. Presiding over it all was the twinkly-eyed, white-bearded Albus Dumbledore, not unlike Father Christmas, if thinner than that figure's usual incarnation. High Priest of the Great Hall and deriving considerable enjoyment from seeing everyone "well fed and watered," as he put it, the Headmaster was perennially disappointed he could not get his gaunt Potions Master to eat more.

But Snape could not eat more. He had a place at the staff table, true, but even here he was an outcast. Unlike the others, he had a past to atone for, an atonement that bizarrely took the form of appearing still to be evil. It was enough to spoil anyone's appetite.

And it had all gotten so much worse since the Dark Lord had returned to his body. His cadaverous, dead-white, inhuman body. Snape shuddered. That skeletal form was an apt emblem of everything Voldemort represented. And everything he represented was the exact opposite of the generosity embodied by Dumbledore and plump, motherly Molly Weasley. Not only did Voldemort not nurture his followers in a metaphoric sense, he literally did not feed them. The meagre refreshments at Death-Eater meetings were mostly reserved for an emaciated leader who seemed scarcely to require food. The main thing Voldemort fancied was fine wine, and it was rumored that Lucius Malfoy, eager to curry favour with the Dark Lord he had abandoned for so long, was being put to ruinous expense in the hunt for rare vintages.

No, the Dark Lord did not feed others but instead fed on them, draining life-energy the way vampires sucked blood or dementors devoured souls. To the extent that food figured at Death-Eater gatherings, it was mainly in the form of punishment: Voldemort was always threatening to feed those who displeased him to his ghastly snake Nagini, a creature large enough to gobble any one of them whole. Snape had, in fact, almost been Nagini's first snack following the resurrection of her grim master. It was not so very long ago—only last month—when he'd arrived at the graveyard of Little Hangleton and labored to convince a deeply skeptical and enraged Voldemort of his allegiance. It was a tribute to Snape's magisterial control of Occlumency that he'd shown Voldemort mental images of betraying Dumbledore while blocking proof of his continued loyalty to the Headmaster. Much to Snape's relief and (it must be admitted) surprise, the ruse worked. Oh, there had been a predictable amount of ritual torture. But Nagini did not get a human meal that night.

By this point in his musings Snape had almost reached the point in the road from which he would apparate to Spinner's End, his dismal childhood home in the decayed industrial north. Once he got there, he'd have to scrounge for supper in a pantry he kept scarcely better stocked than it had been during his down-at-heel youth. There had never been a lot to eat in the Snape household, much less the type of food one craved when, like now, one was anxious or depressed. What did Muggles call that sort of thing—comfort food?

Strange phrase. When had he ever been consoled by food?

Ah, but there had been several instances. Only several, but they starred the long darkness of his memories like small circles of light. As usual, these occasions tended to feature Lily Evans: Lily bearing chocolate Easter eggs to Spinner's End during spring break of their first year at Hogwarts, Lily slipping him a packet of chocolate frogs in the Great Hall on his birthday the next year. Was there a chocolate theme? He recalled a more recent incident the year before, when his colleague in Muggle Studies offered him home-baked brownies—a thoughtful gift that, to a man secretly in terror of the Dark Lord's return, tasted like food of the gods.

Well, chocolate _did _help one recover from dementor attacks. So it was unsurprising that chocolate figured largely on those rare occasions in his life when food cemented bonds of friendship and trust. Maybe he'd have to slip out later, once he got back to Lancashire, and buy a Cadbury bar at the local Muggle store. He'd always rather liked those.

Yet he would still be eating alone.

It was almost certain: his hunger for community would never be sated on this earth. That he would even remain on this earth much longer was, of course, highly unlikely: each day brought increased danger of betrayal and death. Still, however long he lived he would remain emotionally starved, a ravenous soul imagining feasts of which he could not partake. He would continue to be a paradox: striving for redemption while acting damned, healing and saving while simultaneously bullying and apparently betraying. Empty within, he would work so that others—many of whom he did not even like—lived long and full lives. All he could do was hunger and thirst for that most intangible ideal, justice. And it was far from certain he would live to see it triumph. Or that it would triumph at all.

But he would have to do his best to ensure that it did. Wrapping his cloak more tightly around him, no longer looking backward toward Grimmauld Place, Snape turned on the spot and vanished into the enveloping night.


End file.
